Revolution IN PERSPECTIVE Revolution I N PE R SPEC TIV E Essays on the Hungarian Soviet Republic o f 1919 Edited by Andrew C. Janos and W illiam B. Slottman University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London >97» University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England Copyright © 1971, by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74-138510 International Standard Book Number: 0-520-01920-2 Designed by James Mennick Printed in the United States of America Contents Preface vii 1. The Decline of Oligarchy: Bureaucratic and Mass Pol itics in the Age of Dualism (1867-1918) by Andrew C. Janos, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley 1 2. Coalition Politics in the Hungarian Soviet Republic by Peter Kenez, Assistant Professor of History, Univer sity of California, Santa Cruz 61 3. The Agrarian Opposition at the National Congress of Councils by Andrew C. Janos 85 4. The Rumanian Socialists and the Hungarian Soviet Republic by Keith Hitchins, Professor of History, University of Illinois, Urbana 109 5. Austria’s Geistesaristokraten and the Hungarian Rev olution of 1919 by William B. Slottman, Professor of History, Univer sity of California, Berkeley 145 6. The Hungarian Soviet and International Communism by Richard Löwenthal, Professor of Political Science, Free University of Berlin 173 Index 183 Preface C elebrating the anniversaries of great events or the birth days of great men has become one of the major intellectual and social pastimes of the academic community. In honor of each occasion a conference is held, scholars are asked to in dulge in a mixture of nostalgia and analysis, and a book is usually produced that presents the papers and comments made upon them by those attending the celebration. Such occasions are often memorable for reasons not strictly aca demic. Tragic or comic stories are told of the scholars who fail to appear, of papers that do not arrive on time, of dis cussions that become too polemical, and of social events that wander from the solemnity appropriate to the occa sion. Scholars specializing in the history and politics of the area once embraced by the Habsburg monarchy have been particularly prone to indulging in this pastime. In recent years they have had abundant reason for doing so, since in a few years they have been able, indeed expected, to remem ber the Zusammenbruch of 1918, the emergence of the newly independent states of Austria and Czechoslovakia, and the peace treaties signed in various Parisian suburbs that had some bearing on the fate of the Danubian peoples. In addition, they also had to mark anniversaries that went back one hundred years to Königgrätz and the establish ment of the Dual monarchy. For scholars with the requisite time and energy it was possible to be constantly in move- viii • Revolution in Perspective ment, as one after another anniversary rolled around with almost frightening frequency. When we first entertained the idea of holding a con ference that would mark the proclamation of the Hungar ian Soviet Republic on March 21, 1919, we were conscious that we might be risking an expression of apathy on the part of many scholars in this field. We knew that there had been too many anniversaries, and we were also aware that this particular one had its ambiguities. The 133 days of the Kun regime had not given it a well-defined niche in history, and it continued to appear to be episodic or parochially Hun garian. The regime had not suffered from a bad press but rather from a desire of its would-be chroniclers to turn to other and more attractive events. The reasons for a lack of interest in Hungary were obvious enough and respectable enough; the reasons for a similar lack of interest outside of Hungary were not. But Western Europeans and Americans might be forgiven for not turning with enthusiasm to men who had not made an impressive mark on history, had not been particularly distinguished as political figures or attrac tive as human beings, and who had not even been fortunate enough to make a major contribution to the folklore of world revolution. This apathy and absence of a large scientific literature did suggest that a conference of the kind we envisaged might be of some use. If we could bring together scholars with more than the usual degree of polite interest in our theme and present papers that would elicit real discussion on the part of all participants, we could add to the general store of information and present the Hungarian Soviet Republic without making a claim for completeness or for providing a comprehensive réévaluation of the regime. The papers pre sented at the Berkeley Conference on March 21-22, 1969, tried to break new ground by approaching selected issues of Preface • ix political history but maintaining a certain balance between internal and external affairs as well as between the ante cedents and the impact of the revolutionary events. One of the papers presented and published here dealt with the ori gins of the revolution: Andrew C. Janos in his “Decline of Oligarchy: Bureaucratic and Mass Politics in the Age of Dualism, 1867-1918“ attempted to explore connections be tween the Soviet Republic and the previous history of Hun garian politics and society. Two papers were devoted to the internal political history of the regime: Peter Kenez's “Coalition Politics in the Hungarian Soviet Republic“ and Andrew C. Janos's “The Agrarian Opposition at the Na tional Congress of Councils“ hoped to remove some of the mystery that had been allowed to collect around the politi cal structure of the Kun regime. Another two essays ex amined the record of the Republic from the vantage point of Hungary's neighbors to the east and the west. Keith Hitchins studied the reactions of the Rumanians in Tran sylvania “The Rumanian Socialists and the Hungarian Soviet Republic," and the reactions of the grandees of Aus trian culture to contemporary events in Hungary are dis cussed by William Slottman in “Austria's Geistesaristokra ten and the Hungarian Revolution of 1919.“ Richard Löwenthal's “Revolution in Perspective" completes the series of articles by establishing links between the events in Hungary and the subsequent history of Communism. In presenting these articles in book form we must ex press our gratitude to the Center for Slavic and East Euro pean Studies of the University of California for a grant that made the conference and this book possible. We wish to thank the scholars who joined us on that occasion for their company, their enthusiasm for our theme, and the sugges tions they made to those who presented the papers. We should like to express our special thanks to Professor David x • Revolution in Perspective C. Hooson, the Chairman of the Center, for his many kind nesses, and to its Secretary, Mrs. Eileen Grampp, for all she did to organize the conference and to assist us in preparing these articles for publication. A. C. J. W. B. S. i The D ecline o f Oligarchy Bureaucratic and Mass Politics in the Age o f Dualism (1867-1918) Andrew J. Janos In the broadest sense this first chapter is addressed to the ancien régime overthrown by the revolutions of 1918— 1919. More explicitly, it examines the structure and dis integration of the pre-1918 political system and the rise of centrifugal forces in Hungarian society that eventually led to the upheavals in the wake of World War I. What was the character of the old regime and what conditions explain its demise? These are the main questions that this chapter sets out to answer. Beyond their immediate relevance to the subject mat ter of this book, its themes have been selected because of some dissastisfaction with the way in which Hungarian his toriography, both Marxist and nationalist (as well as pre- Marxist radical), has traditionally treated them. Irrespec tive of ideological bent, major histories of the so-called Age of Dualism (or Compromise Era) tend to commit the same fundamental error; they view the history of Hungary from the perspective of categories derived from the unique ex- 2 • Revolution in Perspective periences of a handful of Western societies, above all from those of Britain, France, and Germany. Not surprisingly has had debilitating consequences for empirical research, these categories often fail to fit Hungarian reality, which Frequently significant aspects of social and political rela tions have been ignored merely because of the lack of ob vious analogies with patterns in the history of the West. In other instances, facts have been stretched to fit a precon ceived framework, or even worse, the use of convenient labels has taken the place of empirical research. These ten dencies have led to the widespread application of such terms as “feudal,” “traditional,” or “feudal-capitalist,” in describ ing the character of the political regime, and were partly responsible for the standard image of Hungary ruled by a landed aristocracy under governments insensitive to mod ern ideas and the hard realities of socio-economic change. Curiously enough, in this respect there is hardly any differ ence between such conservative critics of the regime as Gyula Szekfü 1 and the more recent castigators of the Age of Dualism. The purpose of this discussion is not to refute but to modify this image. For one, there will be no attempt here to deny the continued and disproportionate influence of the landed classes, nor the political survival of groups that had been part of the pre-1848 feudal institutional order. On the other hand, it will be necessary to argue for the growing differentiation of the ruling classes, and to point out the as cendancy of a bureaucratic machine that became an interest group in its own right and, for reasons of self-preservation, responded vigorously to the social, economic, and political imperatives of modernization often in conflict with the in-1 1 See especially the generally accepted conservative critique of Hun garian politics in the era of the compromise, Gyula Szekfü, Hdrom Nemzedèk (Three Generations), (Budapest: Egyetemi Nyomda, 1920). Janos: The Decline of Oligarchy • 3 terests of the landed classes. In this respect, one should fur ther point out, the Hungarian experience was different from the better-known Western models of modernization, but similar to the experiences of contemporary “emerging nations” struggling, as Hungary did in the nineteenth cen tury, to overcome the psychological and material handicaps of backwardness and belated development. If problems of structure and performance raise ques tions of interpretation, then political disintegration (the second half of our subject) raises questions of conceptualiza tion as well. Complex political change, of course, may be analyzed intuitively, yet much is to be said for a more sys tematic approach that may lead us onto new paths of in quiry. Thus we will discuss the crisis of Hungarian politics from the perspective of “social mobilization” and “political development,” two categories that have emerged from re cent writings in political sociology as well as from empirical studies of the politics of contemporary “developing” na tions. The first one of the pair, “mobilization,” relates to the growing political awareness and “relevance” of wider social strata as they break away from a traditional way of life and emerge as a “public” available for sustained political activity and commitments. This process is the result of such aspects of modernization as literacy, exposure to mass com munications, and changing forms of economic organization. Social mobilization occurs when “large numbers of people [are] moving away from a life of local isolation, traditional ism and political apathy, and [are] moving into a different life of broader and deeper involvement in the vast com plexities of modem life, including potential and actual in volvement in mass politics.” 2 Mobilization releases new political forces and calls for adaptations on the part of the 2 Karl W. Deutsch, “Social Mobilization and Political Development,“ The American Political Science Review, LV:3 (1961), 494. 4 • Revolution in Perspective political system, the most significant of these being “de velopment,” that is, the incorporation of the rising strata into an institutional framework for mass politics.8 Develop ment in this sense is not identical with democracy, but it does imply the recognition of social diversity, the routiniza- tion of give-and-take, and the establishment of standard pro cedures (such as elections) that by themselves are capable of legitimating public policy. Though we often use the term “developing” in con nection with many countries of the contemporary world as if anticipating a particular outcome, the evidence suggests that we deal with a precarious process, fraught with dangers and contingent upon a number of conditions. In general terms, development appears to depend on the successful ab sorption and incorporation of newly mobilized strata into the status and reward system of society. To put it in differ ent words, in order to develop politically a society must provide, by autonomous adaptation or conscious design, economic benefits and new avenues of mobility to large numbers of people, above all to those who acquire new pol itical skills and competence through exposure to modem education. This in turn depends on the subjective condi tion of the “openness” of the old elites, their receptivity to new social groups and modem political symbols (especially to symbols emphasizing equity in social recruitment and the distribution of social values),*4 and on the objective con- 8 This concept of “development" was first elaborated in Samuel P. Huntington, “Political Development and Political Decay," World Politics, XVIII:2 (1965), 386-430. 4 The notion that equity is a fundamental aspect of modem legitimacy, and hence of development, is generally accepted in contemporary political writing, and forms one of the central ideas of a project on development sponsored by the Committee on Comparative Politics of the American Social Science Research Council. For discussions of the subject see Lucian W. Pye, Aspects of Political Development (Bos- Janos: The Decline of Oligarchy • 5 dition of material resources that set limits to consumption, social services, and the number of high status positions that the system can provide. As a corollary one may also hypo thesize that the success of political development depends on a continued favorable balance between social mobilization and economic growth, or the rate at which society is capable of producing material resources and new forms of wealth. The politics of social mobilization therefore is not al ways the politics of development. As the gap widens be tween aspirations and fulfillment, between demands and resources, the effectiveness of the government will be in jeopardy unless bolstered by repression. But since tradition al oligarchies, autocracies, and bureaucratic polities are no toriously weak on this score, being restrained by habits and covenants that sustain their legitimacy, the outcome of mo bilization will be more frequently political stagnation or decay. The government of a modernizing society will often find itself in a vicious circle: Economic limitations breed in effectiveness, ineffectiveness breeds popular contempt, which in turn further lessens the chances of overcoming economic disabilities. The next stage may be anarchy or revolution from which eventually a new elite may arise pos sessing the skills of mass communication, organization, and repression, and capable of rallying the mobilized strata of society around grandiose schemes of social change and uto pian visions of the future. This is a frequent pattern for political change in the modernizing countries of our days and, in brief, this is also the story told on the following pages and in the later chapters of the book. Our story of the old regime must start with the Aus gleich or Compromise of 1867, the act of reconciliation be ton: Little, Brown, 1966), pp. 45-47. Also, David E. Apter, The Politics of Modernization (Chicago: University Press, 1965), pp. 1-43. 6 • Revolution in Perspective tween the house of Habsburg and the Hungarian political nation. This act ended nearly two decades of autocratic government and settled Hungary's relations with the Crown as well as with the rest of the Habsburg realm. In short, this document restored the domestic autonomy of the country while specifying that foreign relations and defense (as well as finances pertaining to them) were to remain “common affairs" and designating customs, commerce, and fiscal poli cies as “affairs of common concern" for the Austrian and Hungarian governments. The emperor of Austria was to be crowned the king of Hungary, enjoy the traditional prerog atives of Hungarian royalty, and act as the commander-in- chief of a common Austro-Hungarian army. The Compromise restored constitutional government that had its origins in the Middle Ages but had been subject ed to overhaul in 1848. It now provided for Cabinet govern ment responsible to the two houses of parliament. One of these was a House of Lords whose membership, with some exceptions, was hereditary. Politically more significant than the lords was the House of Representatives returned by an electorate that included approximately 6 per cent of the population. Although the legal and political rights of com moners had been recognized in 1848, political practices and ingrained habits favored the traditionally “established classes," the aristocracy and the lesser nobility 5 (now com monly referred to as the “gentry"), and ensured their con tinued public prominence. Throughout the entire period members of these classes dominated the Cabinet6 and the 0 In Hungarian law and custom a formal distinction existed between a titled aristocracy (barons, counts, and dukes) and a “common" or untitled nobility. In 1842 the former included 169 families, the latter comprised an estimated 135,000 families or approximately 5.5 per cent of the population. 6 A list of all Hungarian cabinet ministers appears in Hungarian Royal Janos: The Decline of Oligarchy • 7 House of Representatives. In the latter, in 1869 the gentry and the aristocracy*7 comprised 69.4 per cent of the mem bership (56.1 and 13.3 per cent respectively), in 1872, 77.4 per cent.8 Thereafter the grip of the traditional classes over parliament began to slip. But as late as 1910, 58.4 per cent of the representatives still belonged to one or the other estate of the nobility (42.4 per cent to the gentry and 16 per cent to the aristocracy).9 The presence of the gentry was even more evident in the newly created system of public administration. When constitutional government was restored, tens of thousands of the offspring of gentry families applied for positions and the governments of the day took a sympathetic view of their plight. Under Kâlmân Tisza's premiership it became official policy to favor the gentry in bureaucratic recruitment, and by the end of Tisza’s long years in office, the common nobil ity were firmly entrenched in all branches of the civil ser vice. In 1890 more than two-thirds (67.5 per cent) of the senior officials (fogalmazôi kar) in the Office of the Prime Minister were of gentry origin. In the Ministry of the In terior this figure was 64.1 and even in the less exclusive De partment of Finance it was 53.8 per cent. The proportion Office of Statistics (Magyar Kirâlyi Statisztikai Hivatal), Magyarorszâg Tiszti d m is Nivtdra (The Directory of Official Hungary), (Buda pest: Magyar Kirâly i A'llami Nyomda, 1938), pp. 4-7. Titles of no bility are either indicated or can be checked against information in Béla Kempelen, Magyar nemesi csaladok (Hungarian Noble Fam ilies), I-VI (Budapest: Grill, 1911-1936). 7 Hungarian constitutional law, unlike British, did not bar peers from membership in the lower chamber. 8 Emö Lakatos, Magyar politikai vezetöriteg, 1848-1918 (Hungarian Political Elites, 1848-1918), (Budapest: Élet Nyomda, 1942, pp. 26 and 46. 9 Based on Ferenc Végvàry and Ferenc Zinner, Orszàggyülesi Almanach (Parliamentary Almanac), (Budapest: Pàzmâneum, 1910), and Kem pelen, op. cit 8 • Revolution in Perspective of the gentry was even higher in local administration: 48 out of the 64 chief administrative officers (alispân) of the counties came from gentry families, three of them from the titled aristocracy.101“In the seventies and eighties/' writes one social historian of the period, “the best letter of recom mendation for an administrative career was a noble name. . . . At first came the impoverished members of illustrious families, then the petty noblesse and ultimately the educat ed offspring of the beggar (bocskoros) nobility." 11 Thus al though the numerical preponderance of these groups con tinued to be a conspicuous aspect of public life, the profile of the politically active nobility had undergone consider able transformations. Before 1848 the typical public figure was not only a nobleman but also the owner of considerable tracts of land. At the National Assembly of 1848 and the short-lived diet of 1861 prosperous country squires were still supreme in number and influence,12 but after 1867 the trend was reversed and in the last quarter of the nineteenth century only about one-third of all deputies in the lower house were land-owners. Most deputies now came from oc cupational groups more characteristic of modem, urban ized societies. Approximately one-fourth of the membership of the House of Representatives were lawyers, one-fifth of them qualified as “freelancers" (active in writing, journal ism, and the arts), and a substantial number of them came from the civil service into parliamentary life (Table I). In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the gen try was not only prominent among office holders but also 10 Magyaroszdg Tiszti d m és Névtàra (Budapest: Kirâlyi Statisztikai Hivatal, 1890). 11 Zoltân Lippay, A magyar birtokos kôzéposztdly és a kôzélet (The Hungarian Landed Middle-Class and Public Life), (Budapest: Frank lin, 1919), p. 98. 12 Lakatos, op. cit.t p. 49. Janos: The Decline of Oligarchy • 9 among the electorate. The franchise laws of 1848 and 1874 established an economic and educational census for voting — the ownership of one-quarter session of land (approxi mately 7 to 10 acres), in urban areas the ownership of a Table I. O ccupational D istribution in th e H ouse of R epresentatives, 1892 and 1901 (in percent ) Year land profes Free Bureau- Business Other owners sionals* lancers crats 1892 37.5 25.7 9.3 18.1 5.8 3.6 1901 31.7 29.0 11.1 18.3 3.9 6.0 •Includes lawyers, doctors, pharmacists. Source : Rezsö Rudai, “Adalék a magyar képviselôhâz szoriolôgiâ- jâhoz, 1887-1931” (Notes on the Sociology of the Hungarian House of Representatives, 1887-1931), Tdrsadalomtudomdny, XIII (1933), 215- 230. house or the payment of 10 florins in direct taxes, or else ten years of education or more—but exempted members of the petty nobility from them by stipulating that anyone whose family name had appeared in any of the voting registers be fore 1848 (when only noblemen had the right to vote) would be entitled to cast a ballot by “ancestral right“ irrespective of property or educational qualifications. These bills gave the country an electorate of about 700,000 including 5.8 per cent of the total population in 1874. In the same year, 168,- 921 voters or almost one-fourth of this electorate took ad vantage of this clause. In Transylvania where a special census had been adopted to exclude all but 3.2 per cent of the population, the impoverished gentry, with 80,896 votes, made up 66 per cent of the electorate.18 In the subse quent years the number of voters by “ancestral right“ de-13* 13 Annuaire Statistique Hongrois, VIII (1900), 389. Also Hungary Parliament: House of Representatives Orszâggyülés: Képviselôhâz), Naplô (Proceedings), XI (1874), 343. 10 • Revolution in Perspective dined as the gentry entered the professions and the bureaucracy and began to register under different clauses of the electoral law. (It was only 48,201 in 1901 and 22,908 in 1910.)14 But throughout these years their class played a sig nificant role in electoral politics, a role that was even more pronounced because of the relative apathy and inexperi ence of the rest of the electorate. However, the gentry's public prominence and political weight was not primarily due to numbers but to organiza tion, specifically to their hold over the system of public ad ministration. With the levy and collection of new taxes, the issuance of licenses and the regulation of rural life by scores of ordinances, the bureaucracy began to loom large in the village. The gendarme, the tax collector, and the chief no tary (the head of the village administration) gradually sup planted the local squire in the lives of many rural inhabi tants. Emancipated from the tutelage of the feudal land- owner, the independent smallholder was now under the sway of officialdom; and since peasant farmers made up the bulk of the voters in the countryside, the electoral process became vulnerable to administrative pressure and subver sion, giving the bureaucracy a powerful leverage over par liamentary politics. Electoral corruption—the purchase of votes and the use of forgery and intimidation—had been known in Hun garian politics before, but in the last quarter of the nine teenth century such methods of influencing elections be came routinized and institutionalized. Under the premier ship of Kâlmân Tisza a large number of “rotten boroughs" were created virtually under the bureaucratic tutelage. From 1875 on in approximately 160 constituencies (out of a total of 413)15 candidates of the incumbent party were*10 14 Annuaire Statistique Hongrois, XIX (1911), 438. 10 See Ferenc Fodor, “A magyar képviselôvâlasztâsok térképe, 1861- Janos: The Decline of Oligarchy • 11 returned with monotonous regularity, frequently without opposition. These districts, inhabited mainly by Slovaks, Rumanians, and other national minorities, were treated by the governments of the day as so many feudal fiefs to be granted as patrimonies to the personal entourage of the prime minister (the so-called Mameluke Guard) or to can didates favored by high officials in public administration. Through this device Tisza integrated the now centralized bureaucracy with the parliamentary Liberal party thereby laying down the foundations of a political machine that was to occupy the center of the stage until the end of the period. While the bureaucracy was used to “make” elections and to ensure the perpetuation of the Liberal majority, the latter became the chief representative of public administration in parliament providing an aura of legitimacy to bureaucratic policies and interests. This arrangement did not lack an element of reciprocity and bargaining, and the machine had none of the single-minded ideological devotion of modern totalitarian organizations, yet it enabled the premiers of Hungary to maintain continuity of purpose and policy. Above all, it strengthened the position of the government vis-à-vis the Crown and the Austrian half of the monarchy and acted as an instrument of maintaining Magyar suprem acy in domestic politics by effectively excluding Slovak and Rumanian voters from political participation. This machine obviously dominated but did not mo nopolize national politics. Far from being a model autoc racy, the political system permitted the representation of diverse economic interests. Most conspicuously, the eco nomic weight of the latifundia was taken into account in 1915” (The map of Hungarian parliamentary elections, 1861-1915) in Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Hungarian Peace Negotia tions: The Hungarian Peace Delegation in Neuilly (Budapest: Her- nady, 1922), IIIB, Annex VII. 12 • Revolution in Perspective both houses of parliament. In the upper chamber landed interests were represented directly, though the powers of the peers were now considerably shorn by law and custom. More significant was the indirect influence of the aris tocracy over the House of Representatives where 50 to 70 seats were virtually at the disposal of the large estates. The electorate of these constituencies consisted mainly of the tenants and clients of a single large landowner whose economic influence in the village outweighed the admini strative leverages available for local officials. Some of the patrons of such boroughs would sit in the House of Rep resentatives themselves (there was, one should remember, no ban on the election of peers to the lower chamber) others merely sent their lawyers and bailiffs to represent them while they would take their seat in the House of Lords. In other instances, as had been the custom in Britain before 1832, such constituencies were open to young men of talent or else the constituencies would be up for sale. This prac tice, decried as the system of “old corruption“ by a demo cratic century was beneficial in its own time in that it per mitted the representation of urban wealth apart from the bureaucracy and aristocracy. The rest of the constituencies, 180 to 200, were “open“ for electoral contests or at least for competition among sev eral groups of local notables outside the bureaucracy. Most of these boroughs were situated in the Magyar-inhabited areas of the Great Plain and in eastern Transylvania where the local gentry and a Protestant smallholding class was independent-minded and stubborn enough to resist bureau cratic encroachments on their political rights. Thus al though the outcome of general elections was heavily tipped in favor of the incumbents, the margin with which the government would win was decided in the open boroughs, and public opinion (at least in the Magyar areas) would at Janos: The Decline of Oligarchy • 13 least leave its imprint on the composition of the House of Representatives. Furthermore, in accordance with a tacit parliamentary convention, politically prominent indivi duals, including the premier, were to run in the open bor oughs in order to create the aura of popularity to their regime. Consequently it was not unusual for party leaders to emerge as losers from electoral contests. The “all- powerful” Kâlmân Tisza was defeated twice, once in 1878 at the zenith of his career (seeking reelection in the opposi tion bastion of Debrecen) and then again in 1901, retired from the premiership but still a venerated elder statesman of his party. These arrangements were no proper substitutes for free and popular elections but they allowed for a degree of flex ibility and pluralism in the political process by forcing the professional politicians of the machine to bargain, to pro vide payoffs and to coopt various interest groups into the ruling Liberal party. In order to control the majority in the House of Representatives any government had to win about 50 seats in addition to the 160 boroughs under bureaucratic patronage. A comfortable margin would require even more extra seats. These would have to come either through buy ing the support of the wealthy classes or by winning in the open boroughs, or through some combination of the two. The bargaining process woud entail preelection commit ments; or else, between elections, raising the prospect of secession from or fusion with the government party. At times these secessions and fusions became so frequent that many observers were inclined to describe them as the func tional equivalent of a working two-party system. A detailed description of all these parliamentary maneuvers would re quire a separate treatment. Here we can only list some of the most massive desertions from the Liberal party: In 1876, sixty-eight deputies defected on account of disagreements 14 • Revolution in Perspective with the government's handling of fiscal negotiations with Austria; in 1878, six deputies defected to form an anti- Semitic group under the leadership of Victor Istöczy; in 1894, twenty-eight deputies left the Liberal party on the issue of civil marriage and church-state relations—some of these defectors eventually returning to the fold, others form ing their own Catholic People's party; in December 1898, thirty-eight deputies, almost all of them landowning aristo crats, crossed the aisle in protest against Premier Bânffy's handling of appropriations; in 1899, almost the entire con servative opposition fused with the Liberal party only to leave it again in the spring of 1904, whereas in Novem ber of the same year two dozen more deputies left to form a new Constitution party on the opposition. During the thirty years of unbroken Liberal rule (1875-1905) the gov erning party lost, and eventually regained, at least 250 of its parliamentary deputies. The threat of secession always hung over the party, and to avoid them the prime ministers reg ularly had to consult their entourage. At critical junctures they had to ask for votes of confidence, and the results were often adverse. Kâlmân Tisza himself, the architect of ma chine politics and the founder of the Mameluke Guard, was no exception. At the time of the budget crisis of 1877, for instance, he polled the Liberal caucus: 181 deputies voted for and 69 against his policy while 94 abstained.16 Two of Tisza's successors (Bânffy in 1899 and Khuen- Hédervâry in 1903) were thrown out of their high office by backbench rebellions, the latter by a formal vote of the Liberal rank and file. The autocratic tendencies of the system were mitigated and its pluralistic elements further enhanced by a number 16 Gusztâv Gratz, A dualizmus kora (The Age of Dualism), (Buda pest: Magyar Szemle Târsasâg, 1934), I, 159. Janos: The Decline of Oligarchy • 15 of habits, conventions, and quasi-institutions that operated as correctives in the absence of free competition and rep resented built-in restraints on the arbitrary exercise of power. In the last analysis these restraints derived from a long legal and parliamentary tradition shared by the mem bers of the ruling classes. As such, they were most effective in protecting the personal and political rights of the mem bers of the establishment: the gentry and the aristocracy. But at the same time, more by default than by design, they were also instrumental in blunting the harshness of the bureaucratic regime toward the lower classes and the na tional minorities. Politically, the most significant of these “correctives” was the practice of parliamentary obstruction. Just as in the leisurely days of the old, feudal Diet, the parliamentary rules of procedure were lax. No restrictions existed about the time allotted to the individual speakers, and such de vices as the “kangaroo” or the “guillotine” used in the Brit ish Commons and other parliaments to curb debate were unknown. One deputy could challenge the accuracy of the minutes, and only twenty signatures were needed to ask for a roll call. These liberal rules of procedure naturally invited filibustering tactics, in particular so because the opposition parties justly felt that they had little chance to overthrow the government at the polls. When the minority was con fronted with a bill that it regarded as deleterious to its vital interests, it either resorted to the holding of marathonic speeches or else to the tactic of “technical obstruction,” that is, to innumerable challenges of the minutes and requests for roll calls on petty matters of procedure. In one famous instance, the House of Representatives in a midnight vote decided that the debate should have ended at noon; on an other occasion the record of the previous session was chal lenged twenty-one times, and each challenge rejected by a 16 • Revolution in Perspective roll-call vote. Parliamentary obstruction prevented not only the passage of regular bills, but on occasion even routine measures and appropriations. To avoid such embarrassment the prime ministers were forced to bargain with the opposi tion. Premier Széll, for instance, concluded a regular pact with the opposition upon becoming the head of the govern ment. In it the opposition agreed not to obstruct the elec tion of a new speaker of the House of Representatives and the passage of four bills including appropriations. In ex change the prime minister guaranteed the “cleanness" of the forthcoming elections—that is, no interference with vot ing in the open boroughs—and pledged to submit legisla tion to the House to extend the jurisdiction of the High Court of Justice over electoral complaints.17 A second significant corrective was provided by the ju diciary system acting as the guardian of civil and political rights. Trial by one’s own peers had been part of the judi cial tradition of the country, at least as far as the nobility was concerned. In 1848 the judicial system was modernized and the old Lord’s Bench (ûriszék)—a court elected by and from the local nobility—was substituted by regular juries (iesküdtszék) drawn from the voting registers. In disputes that involved citizens and the state these juries tended to be kindly disposed toward their peers and gave the broadest possible interpretation to constitutional law. “In political and libel cases,” writes a socialist critic of the old regime, “acquittal was very frequent.” 18 The disposition of higher courts was no less lenient. In 1912 the High Court of Justice reversed the sentence of Gyula Kovdcs, a deputy who fired five shots at Istvdn Tisza (Kdlmdn’s son and successor in the chair of the prime minister), on the ground that the assail- 17 lb id., I, 397. !8Zoltân Horvàth, Magyar Szàzadfordulô (The T um of the Century in Hungary), (Budapest: Kossuth Kiadd, 1961), p. 337. Janos: The Decline of Oligarchy • 17 ant had acted in the defense of the constitution. Another celebrated case was the libel suit brought by Premier Lukacs against Deputy Zoltân Désy who had publicly de scribed the head of the government as the greatest swindler in Europe, accusing him of the misappropriation of public funds. By acquitting Désy, the High Court tacitly acknow ledged the validity of the charges and brought about the resignation of the premier. Pursuant to legislation in 1899 the High Court also offered a measure of protection against electoral abuse, at least in the Magyar-inhabited “open” boroughs. In 1901 the court investigated four, in 1905 five, in 1906 four, in 1910 fifty-two complaints.19 In sixteen of these cases the court ruled for new elections. In these cases the court usually found that the voters of the opposition parties, usually Magyar nationalists or conservatives, had been prevented from reaching the polling place, or other wise grossly mistreated by the gendarmerie or local ad ministration. When and where the regular courts failed to intercede on behalf of some members of the establishment, the traditional code of honor of the ruling class was invoked to protect its members from the machinations of the gov ernment or the bureaucracy. Thus in 1878 a court of honor blackballed Kâlmân Tisza for “unparliamentary behavior.” Premier Banffy, although a member of a baronial family, was declared by his fellow aristocrats as “socially unaccept able, a nongentleman, and a person not to be admitted to any social club.” While the great Tisza had survived politi cally the blackballing, Banffy did not. Other premiers fared better, but many of them had to fight duels and were in volved in endless affairs of honor on account of their public activities. The courts of law were far less favorably disposed to- l®Reports of the Committee on Credentials. To be found in first and second sessions of the respective volumes of the Naplô. 18 • Revolution in Perspective ward the rights of the national minorities and of the politi cal representatives of the lower classes. The same juries that indignantly defended the freedom of their peers found no fault in convicting Rumanians and Slovaks for incitement or in sending to jail Socialist agitators. The same High Court that reversed electoral results in Magyar constituen cies failed to review complaints by candidates of parties rep resenting the national minorities who claimed that voting registers had been falsified or that votes had been invalidat ed on rather tenuous grounds. Nor was the court sym pathetic to the Agrarian Socialist leader Andräs Achim whose mandate it suspended on the flimsy pretext that his election had been obtained by seditious means. Neverthe less the fact that “political” and libel cases were tried in public, by courts of law and in observance of procedural standards, ensured a measure of fairness and leniency in treatment. Reading about the political trials of the period involving the national minorities and the Socialists one is first struck by the great number of cases in court, then by the relative leniency of the sentences. According to the care ful documentation of Robert Seton-Watson, in one critical decade (1898-1908), 503 Slovaks were indicted on charges ranging from incitement to riot to abusing the Hungarian flag, and in 81 trials drew a total of 79 years and 6 months. During the same period 216 Rumanians were sentenced to 38 years and 9 months.20 These aggregate figures were im pressive but a division of years by sentences yields averages of 1.6 and 2.2 months. In most cases the terms were to be served in the nominal captivity of “state confinement” (dZ- lamfoghdz). Longer sentences were usually reduced or sus pended by executive clemency. In one of the best-known 20 Robert Seton-Watson, Racial Problems in Hungary (London: Con stable, 1908), pp. 448-466. Janos: The Decline of Oligarchy • 19 trials of the age, the sixteen authors of the Rumanian Me morandum to the crown were sentenced to a total of 29 years in May 1894. The sentences were appealed and upheld in the higher courts, but on September 17,1895, all defendants were released from confinement.21 The records of the Social ist movement, as published by one of its leading members, show 916 indictments in the prewar period resulting in an aggregate sentence of 24 years and 11 months, or an ap proximate average of 12 days.22*These repressive measures embittered relations between government and population and on the whole remained ineffective. They could not stem the tide of social and national protest, nor could they serve as a major policy instrument in the hands of the govern ments in shaping society according to their will. Tradition and the pluralism restrained the coerciveness and in the final analysis restricted the choices open for public policy. The influx of the gentry had an obvious impact on the character of the bureaucracy and the political machine. Public administration, the ministries, and the “government party“ (the perennial Liberal majority) came to resemble huge fraternities of social equals and traditional communi ties sustained by family relationships and common social symbols rather than the impersonal norms of modern as sociations. This was evident in various conversational forms. All members of the party and the bureaucracy were expect ed to use the cordial and familial te (corresponding to the German du) and it was customary for senior officials to ad dress their subordinates affectionately as “son“ (fiam) or “younger brother“ (ôcsém) while the latter would address 2iSee Budapesti Hirlap, news items on September 18 and 20, 1895. 22Vilmos Böhm, Két forradalom tüzében (In the Crossfire of Two Revolutions), (Wien: Bécsi Magyar Kiadd, 1923), p. 19. 20 • Revolution in Perspective their superiors as “uncle” (bâty&m). The use of “Mister” and the third person singular, maga, was slightly deroga tory and was mainly reserved for outsiders. With the stub bornness of déclassés the gentry bureaucrat also insisted on the external symbols of status and class solidarity. While working as a small clerk or administrative assistant (fogal- maid) he might proudly wear the high boots or feathered country hat of his landed cousins or ancestors. Almost ritual ly he would attend shooting parties and entertain lavishly even though he might have to go hungry for a month after ward. More than ever before, the gentry looked down upon manual labor and shunned economic achievement, an atti tude that was most pungently expressed in the gentlemanly bon mot that “money was a gift of God to be spent for pleasure.” In action this machine was neither conspicuously corrupt nor grossly inept, but the efficient handling of offi cial business was reserved for fellow members of the estab lishment, while the rest of the public, above all the peasant ry, was treated with indifference or outright contempt. If the Balkan idea of service in exchange for petty cash was alien to the system, so was the Anglo-Saxon idea of civil ser vice. By every token, officialdom regarded itself as the master and not the servant of the underlying society. Yet while carrying forth these traditional symbols and attitudes the gentry of the bureaucracy and the political ma chine developed an identity of their own as a political class with vested interests in national power and unity. These vested interests took precedence over the particular interests of economic classes. The machine politician now expected that “society succumb to the grandiose demands of state au thority.” 28 This etatism combined with an ostentatious 28Istvân Tisza, Magyar Agrdrpolitika (Hungarian Agrarian Policy), (Budapest: Athaeneum, 1897), p. 18. Janos: The Decline of Oligarchy • 21 anticlericalism—reflecting bureaucratic suspicions of the es tablished church as a major competitor for the loyalties of the citizenry—and a commitment to economic progress and modernization that set the bureaucratic gentry apart from the landed classes. In the name of “progress” the machine politicians of the Liberal party called upon the owners of large and medium estates to adopt efficient modes of produc tion or else abandon their ancestral lands and seek compen sation in politics or in the service of the state. In the years following the Compromise the political class came to sub scribe to the modem idea that land was a commodity that should go to the highest bidder and the most efficient cul tivator: an open invitation to urban capital to take over the ancestral estates of the nobility and to modernize agri cultural economy. Traditional values and contempt for enterpreneurship did not preempt a rational view of economics, but they in duced a particular concept of development, so to say, by proxy. The essence of this view was that the declining no bility should perform political rather than economic func tions, but at the same time should use the power of the state to protect the business class in its pursuit of wealth. The gentry and their party, the Liberals, aimed at creating what W. W. Rostow calls the “preconditions of a takeoff,”24 by making the country hospitable to enterpreneurship and capital investment. Accordingly, in the years following the Compromise, the Liberal party sponsored a vast legislative framework in parliament to modernize the legal structure of the country and designed an extensive and costly program to improve the system of public transportation. In the eighties and nineties earlier slogans of economic liberalism 24 Walt. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge, England: The University Press, 1962), pp. 17-35. 22 • Revolution in Perspective were abondoned and the Liberal party became the chief ad vocate of a policy of subsidies and tax exemptions to en courage industrial growth, without actively engaging the state in processes of production and investment. The major role that the state played in economics was through the arti ficial depression of wage levels and through shifting the costs of social overhead onto the lower classes to allow high er profits for large enterprise and the competitiveness of Hungarian goods on the Austrian and the Balkan markets. Though agrarian by social background, the bureau cracy and the professional politicians of the government party leaned toward banking and industrial interests on grounds of long-range political considerations. These “mer- cantilistic,, sympathies (as they were referred to in common parlance) were much evident in party programs and par liamentary legislation—four major and hundreds of minor industrial acts were passed between 1881 and 1913—as well as in budgetary allocations that consistently favored the ministries of industry and commerce over agriculture.2526In this connection one must also note the extensive ties be tween finance capital and the parliamentary Liberal party. According to a deposition made by Istvân Rakovsky to the House of Representatives in 1896, fifty-five members of the Liberal party held 77 jobs with railroad and transportation companies while another eighty-six held 93 positions with banks and industrial corporations either as legal advisors or as members of the board.2®While on numerous occasions the nature of the parliamentary system made them succumb to heavy agrarian pressure, these Liberal deputies and the 25 See Alexander Matlekovits (ed.), Das Königreich Ungarn statistisch und wirtschaftlich dargestellt (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1900), II, 911. From here on quoted as Das Königreich Ungarn. 26 Naplö (1896), XXI, 305. Janos: The Decline of Oligarchy • 23 mercantilistic sympathies of the party shielded industry and bank capital from the vengeance of the conservative and agrarian landed aristocracy. In 1898 the yearbook of the Budapest Chamber of Commerce, an organization not taken to an overly optimistic view of business opportunities in the country, could still state that “the wisdom of the parlia mentary majority . . . saved the country from the agrarian reaction that has gained ground in Germany and in the Aus trian half of the Monarchy.“27 Bureaucratic perspectives of power, stability and de velopment made the political class the pragmatic defenders of dualism and the Compromise. No less ardently patriotic than their opponents who often denounced them for sub servience, they upheld the settlement not as an act of loyal ty to the dynasty but as an instrument of furthering Hun garian interests inside and outside the country. They would argue with good reason that the partnership with Austria, although falling short of contemporary models of the na tional state, had tangible economic advantages and in addi tion gave Hungary a disproportionate influence in Euro pean politics. The protagonists of this view could always point to Andrâssy’s tenure of office as the foreign minister of the monarchy and his success in promoting policies in spired by Magyar fears of panslavism and Russian domina tion. Indeed, an independent Hungary with sixteen or eighteen million inhabitants (half of them hostile national minorities) could hardly have hoped to make similar ex cursions into great power diplomacy. Moreover, the Hun garian ruling circles had a dynamic view of the dual ar rangement in that they entertained the hope that one day 27 A budapesti kereskedelmi is iparkamara ivkönyve (Yearbook of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Budapest), (Budapest: Pesti könyvwyomda, 1899), pp. 15-16. 24 • Revolution in Perspective the center of power would shift from Vienna to Budapest. In the meantime the Liberal governments of Hungary jealously guarded their constitutional autonomy and pre rogatives. The slightest hint of Austrian intervention into domestic politics was met by immediate rebuttal. Thus when the Austrian premier Kroeber once ventured an opin ion on Hungarian constitutional law, his counterpart in Budapest dismissed the speech as the dilettante view of a “distinguished foreigner.“ The Hungarian governments al so doggedly resisted Austrian attempts to modify the quotas of common expenditures established by the Compromise. Between 1867 and 1890 the Hungarian quota increased by a mere 1.5 per cent despite considerable increases in the sources of public revenue. In 1897 an irate Austrian delega tion demanded a new 42 to 58 division of expenditures but Hungarian obduracy forced them to settle at 32.5 to 67.5.28 The bargaining methods of the Hungarian governments were reckless and reflected the low political integration of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Far from being satisfied with the role of a subservient junior partner, the Hungarian political class tried to make the best out of the dualist ar rangement, bickering for new advantages at every turn. The political machine and the Liberal party of Kâlmân Tisza were closely identified with the gentry, yet not all the gentry were absorbed by the state and the bureaucracy. While perhaps 40 to 50,000 of them became civil servants in the two decades following the Compromise, an equal or even larger number remained outside with no access to the “pork barrel“ that the machine could provide. A percentage of this “unabsorbed“ gentry were educated mostly in the legal profession. Others were on the way to complete social 28 Arthur May, The Hapsburg Monarchy, 1867-1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 348-349. Janos: The Decline of Oligarchy • 25 ruin. They were forced to enter low-class pursuits and sur vived only as a frustrated noble proletariat. These under privileged groups on the whole shared the socio-economic and political perspectives of the incumbent Liberal party. But as their hopes faded to find status and security in the bureaucracy, they turned into a bitter political opposition that saw Hungary's salvation (as well as their own) not in the continued partnership with Austria, but in the expan sion of the national state so that its institutions could ac commodate the declining gentry class in its entirety. This socially threatened and economically deprived element served as the backbone and chief supporter of the Party of Eighteen Forty-eight (in deference to the revolu tion of that year). Founded in 1868, this party first attracted only a miniscule fraction of the electorate, but as economic conditions deteriorated in the eighties and nineties, the Forty-eighters gained ground in parliament where they loudly denounced the concept of common affairs as “mock constitutionalism" and a figleaf for foreign domination. In their programs they advocated the dissolution of the cus toms union as the precondition of economic growth and clamored for an independent Hungarian army. This last point was of particular and immediate importance to the supporters of the party not only as an instrument of national power but also as an attractive refuge for the declining gen try permitting the rise of a genuine Hungarian Junker class in the place of the despised imperial corps of officers with its alien language and spirit. In its official declarations the party stopped short of advocating the dissolution of the dual monarchy, but un officially its members left little doubt that this indeed was their ultimate objective. In the place of the monarchy the Forty-eighters envisaged the rise of a “greater Hungary," spinning a web of imperialistic fantasies that the destitute 26 • Revolution in Perspective gentry was willing to take for political reality. According to a number of writers close to the nationalist opposition Hun gary would gather sufficient strength in the twentieth cen tury to impose her will on the neighboring countries and emerge as a European great power on her own. “Today the Hungarian nation is still in a transitory stage,“ wrote the nationalist journalist and deputy Pàl Hoitsy in 1902. “She is strong enough to resist encroachments coming from the outside, but not yet strong enough to embark upon the road of conquest.“ 29 However, according to Hoitsy, Hungary would shortly annex Bosnia, Dalmatia, and the other small er territories that had been her tributaries in the Middle Ages. “She may or may not annex Serbia.“ In any case, the future generations will live to see Hungarian supremacy over Bulgaria and hear Hungarian spoken on the streets of Sofia.“30 Rumania's fate would be the same, for her people did not possess the true qualities needed to create and sus tain an independent state. These territorial conquests would ensure markets for Hungarian industry yet to be de veloped at a grand scale and no doubt would require large numbers of military and administrative personnel thus pro viding the unintegrated gentry and would-be bureaucrat with a sense of hope, pride, and purpose. This intemperate pauper element was not alone in re jecting the provisions of the Compromise. They found al lies among the members of the rapidly dwindling squire archy and the Protestant smallholding class of eastern Hun gary who gathered under the banner of the National In dependence party founded in 1874. The party was a close ally of the Forty-eighters on the constitutional issue. At a 2» Paul Hoitsy, Nagymagyarorszdg (Greater Hungary), (Budapest: Lampel, 1902), p. 7. so Ibid., p. 1 02 . Janos: The Decline of Oligarchy • 27 number of times the two parties even fused under common leadership and the name "National Independence (1848) Party," but each time they split up again into separate par liamentary factions. Of the two parties the Independents represented a more conservative and moderate force who were content to advocate such reforms as the modification of the imperial escutcheon to include the Hungarian coats- of-arms, national colors for Hungarian regiments, and Hun garian consular representation in foreign countries.81 As to relations with Austria, the Independents insisted on a con structive dialogue and on the revision, rather than the abo lition, of the Compromise. "Common affairs are a reality," wrote the Transylvanian deputy Miklös Bartha, "they can be reformed gradually but not abolished overnight. The way to reform them is to win a parliamentary majority and to become the government of His Majesty." 82 Character istically, the Independent program of 1884 started out with a pledge of loyalty to the Crown, lamenting only the ab sence of a Hungarian royal court "in which our magnates could feel at home and would not be treated as alien in truders." 88 This last sentence may well have been written by one of the Calvinist peers of Transylvania whose num bers were in fact sparsely represented in the court of Vienna. In contrast to the nationalist gentry, the latifundiary aristocracy, the owners of large estates, was willing to accept the constitutional provisions of the Compromise, but gen erally felt uneasy about the social and economic policies of the bureaucratic state. Not all big landowners of the period were aristocrats, nor were all aristocrats big landowners, but*32 si Gyula Mérei, Magyar politikai pdrtprogrammok (Hungarian Party Programs), (Budapest: Ranschburg, 1934), pp. 121-125. 32 Ellenzék (Kolozsvâr), September 23, 1898. 33 Mérei, op. cit., p. 117. 28 • Revolution in Perspective those who were—the “magnates,” to distinguish them from landless peers or landowners without title—represented the hard core of traditional conservatism in Hungarian poli tics. They were a small and exclusive group who in public as well as in private sought to dissociate themselves from the liberal fads and symbols of the age and would refer to themselves with engaging frankness as clericals or reaction aries. T o be sure, one would find an ample number of mag nates among the members of the Liberal party, a fact that generally led historians to conclude that no conflict of in terest existed between the landed aristocracy and the bu reaucratic state machine. What is overlooked here is that the latifundiary aristocracy had preserved its separate iden tity irrespective of party label and that the magnates, due to their economic independence, would be fickle as par liamentary allies. The aristocratic deputies who one day as members of the Liberal party would support the govern ment on one issue, could turn their back on it on another. Indeed, leading conservative figures—Counts Albert Ap- ponyi, Pâl Széchenyi, Robert Zselénszky, Sândor Kârolyi, or Gyula Andrâssy, Jr.—constantly changed their party affilia tion, serving at times as members of the Cabinet while at others as the leaders of various conservative parties of the parliamentary opposition. In the history of the period we can observe several major cycles of conservative-liberal (or bureaucratic- aristocratic) cooperation and antagonism. Between 1867 and 1875 the aristocracy loyally supported Ferenc Deâk, the ar chitect of the Compromise, and his political party. How ever, in 1875, disgruntled with the government’s economic policy and resentful of gentry predominance in the Liberal party twenty-six aristocratic politicians seceded and formed a Conservative party of their own. The life of this party Janos: The Decline of Oligarchy • 29 lasted until 1884 when it faded into a more diluted moder ate opposition whose members would oscillate between the two sides of the aisle generally supporting the Liberal party on constitutional issues and exhorting socioeconomic con cessions in exchange. The conservative-liberal division hardened again in 1892 when the issue of church-state re lations was put before parliament. Then in 1899 an aristo cratic maneuver precipitated the fall of Bânffy which in turn led to a new fusion between the liberal “old guard“ and the conservatives led by Albert Apponyi. The price ex acted by the conservatives was an end to aggressive anti clericalism and a boost in agricultural tariffs, the biggest in the fifty years of the Austro-Hungarian customs union. Yet tensions between the two wings did not abate, and the con servatives pulled out again in 1904 to set up a new Constitu tion party in alliance with the national radicals of the In dependence and Forty-eight parties. This bizarre alliance of dynastic conservatives and national radicals, agrarians and industrializes, won the subsequent elections of 1905 and 1906, but the coalition split up after three years. In 1910 the majority of conservatives joined the National Party of Work, founded by Istvân Tisza to replace the old Liberal party. Whereas the gentry was willing to accept “progress“ for reasons of national power, the aristocrat had strong mis givings about the disruptive consequences of social and eco nomic change. For the magnates modernization implied a direct threat to social status and economic influence, and they responded with attempts to slow down or even halt the process of social transformation. Thus the Conservative Manifesto of 1876, a remarkable document even by the standards of the time, although stopping short of endors ing feudal institutions, took issue with the legal and politi cal reforms of 1848 as detrimental to the stability of social 30 • Revolution in Perspective relations. “Now that physical punishment has been abol ished,“ the writer of the conservative program complained, “masters are defenseless against the insolence of their ser vants.“ The author then makes the following observation: “Instead of being caned the poor man is now subjected to imprisonment and visited by heavy fines. This practice threatens the physical survival of his family.“ 34 Through out the programmatic work there is a transparent anxiety about the loss of aristocratic influence. The writer not only denounces the “finance oligarchy“ but also “the pennyless desperadoes of public life,“848586meaning the professional poli ticians of the gentry class, and espouses the principle that the landed aristocracy alone possesses the innate capacities of responsible political leadership. By social instinct and economic interest the aristocratic conservatives were agrarians and the mainstay of a vigorous pressure group for higher tariffs on grain, lower taxes, and subsidies to agricultural estates. Their economic principles were succinctly summarized by Sândor Kârolyi, the author of the agrarian program of 1902: “What is good for agricul ture is good for the country. We must judge all policies by this standard for three-quarters of the population derive their livelihood from agricultural production. If industry serves the purposes of agricultural development it should be subsidized. If it is detrimental to agrarian interests, it should perish.“ 36 But conservative agrarianism did not merely imply the pragmatic, if overly selfish, pursuit of economic interests. It was rather the cornerstone of a com prehensive social program and political philosophy. The 84 Jânos Asboth, Magyar Conservativ politika (Hungarian Conserva tive Policy), (Budapest, 1876), p. 26. **lbid., p. 113. 86 Naplô, XXI (1895), 230.
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